Malek Jandali

Country of origin: Germany (Syria)

Malek Jandali (Arabic: مالك جندلي‎) (b. 1972), is a Syrian composer and pianist considered to be among the most versatile and creative musicians in the Arab world. He is the first Syrian and only Arab musician to arrange music based on the oldest music notation in the world, which was discovered in the Bronze Age city of Ugarit, Syria.

To read the rest of his Wikipedia article, go here.

August Imgard

Country of origin: Germany

German settler, August Imgard, was said to have put up the first Christmas tree in Ohio and possibly first in the nation in 1847 ...[as well as] sugar "crooks" (candy canes)
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[Also he] had the local tinsmith pound out a metal star for his spruce, where it was placed alongside paper decorations.

From here.

Thomas Nast

Country of origin: Germany

Thomas Nast (September 27, 1840 – December 7, 1902) was a German-born American caricaturist and editorial cartoonist who is considered to be the "Father of the American Cartoon". He was the scourge of Boss Tweed and the Tammany Hall machine. Among his notable works were the creation of the modern version of Santa Claus, and Uncle Sam (the male personification of the American people), as well as the political symbols of both major United States political parties: the Republican elephant and the Democratic donkey.

Read the rest of the Wikipedia article here, or his biography (with gallery) here.

William Wyler

Country of origin: Germany

William Wyler (July 1, 1902 – July 27, 1981) was a leading American motion picture director, producer, and screenwriter. Notable works included Ben-Hur (1959), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and Mrs. Miniver (1942), all of which won Wyler Academy Awards for Best Director, and also won Best Picture. He earned his first Oscar nomination for directing Dodsworth in 1936, starring Walter Huston and Mary Astor, "sparking a 20-year run of almost unbroken greatness." Film historian Ian Freer calls Wyler a "bona fide perfectionist," whose penchant for retakes and an attempt to hone every last nuance, "became the stuff of legend." His ability to direct a string of classic literary adaptations into huge box-office and critical successes made him one of "Hollywood's most bankable moviemakers" during the 1930s and 1940s. Other popular films include Funny Girl (1968), How to Steal a Million (1966), The Big Country (1958), Roman Holiday (1953), The Heiress (1949), The Letter (1940), The Westerner (1940), Wuthering Heights (1939), Jezebel (1938), Dodsworth (1936), A House Divided (1931), and Hell's Heroes (1930).
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Wyler is the most nominated director in Academy Awards history with 12 nominations.

To read more about William Wyler, visit his page on Wikipedia.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Country of origin: Germany

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, CBE (born 7 May 1927) is a Booker prize-winning novelist, short story writer, and two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter. She is perhaps best known for her long collaboration with Merchant Ivory Productions, made up of director James Ivory and the late producer Ismail Merchant. Their films won six Academy Awards.

To read more about Ruth Prawer Jhabvala visit her page on Wikipedia.

Levi Strauss

Country of origin: Germany

Levi Strauss (born Löb Strauß; February 26, 1829 – September 26, 1902) was a German-Jewish immigrant to the United States who founded the first company to manufacture blue jeans. His firm, Levi Strauss & Co., began in 1853 in San Francisco, California.

To read more about Levi Strauss, visit his page on Wikipedia, or visit levistrauss.com

Henry J. Heinz

Country of origin: Germany

Henry John Heinz (October 11, 1844 – May 14, 1919) was an American businessman, who founded the H. J. Heinz Company.

Heinz was one of eight children born to John Henry Heinz. Both parents had emigrated from Kallstadt, Germany and settled in the Birmingham section of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—today known as the South Side.

When Henry was six, the family moved several miles up the Allegheny River to the little town of Sharpsburg. There, at age six, young Henry (called Harry by his family) started helping his mother tend a small backyard garden behind the family home. At age eight Henry was canvassing the neighborhood with a basket under each arm selling vegetables from the family garden door to door. By age nine he was growing, grinding, bottling and selling his own brand of horseradish sauce. At ten he was given a ¾-acre (3,000 m²) garden of his own and had graduated to a wheelbarrow to deliver his vegetables. At twelve he was working 3½ acres (14,000 m²) of garden using a horse and cart for his three-times-a-week deliveries to grocery stores in Pittsburgh. At seventeen he was grossing $2,400 a year—a handsome sum for the times.

Heinz attended public schools and then Duff's Business College. After graduating from college, he started employment with his father's brick manufacturing business, eventually becoming a partner in the firm. All the while he continued growing and selling fresh produce.

To read more about Henry J. Heinz, visit his page on Wikipedia.

Helmuth Naumer

Country of origin: Germany

Helmuth Naumer Sr. (born 1907 in Reutlingen, Germany, died 16 June 1990) was a German American artist. He painted subjects throughout the United States and around the world but New Mexico was his favourite subject.

Naumer studied art in Germany and in 1926, he moved to the United States to experience the West that he had read about in novels of cowboy life. He attended the Frank Wiggins Trade School and the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles and then joined the Merchant Marine. After six years at sea, Naumer moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1932. There he began to work in pastels.

To read more about Helmuth Naumer, visit his page on Wikipedia.

Hannah Arendt

Country of origin: Germany

Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 4, 1975) was a German -American political theorist. She has often been described as a philosopher, although she refused that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular." She described herself instead as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact that "men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world". Arendt's work deals with the nature of power, and the subjects of politics, authority, and totalitarianism.

To read more about Hannah Arendt, visit her page on Wikipedia.

Katherine Esau

Country of origin: Ukraine (of German decent)

Katherine Esau (3 April 1898 – 4 June 1997) was a German-American botanist.

She was born in Yekaterinoslav, Russian Empire (now Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine) to a family of Mennonites of German descent. After the Revolution her family moved to Germany, and then to California, where she achieved her doctorate in 1931. She moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1963, and worked there until 1992. She was the sixth woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1957, and in 1989, President George Bush awarded Dr. Esau the National Medal of Science.

Esau was a pioneering plant anatomist--perhaps the greatest plant anatomist of the 20th century. Her books Plant Anatomy and Anatomy of Seed Plants have been key plant structural biology texts for the last four decades.

To read more about Katherine Esau, visit her page on Wikipedia.

Bill Graham

Country of origin: Germany

Bill Graham (January 8, 1931 – October 25, 1991) was an American impresario and rock concert promoter from the 1960s until his death.

Graham was born Wolodia Grajonca in Berlin and given the nickname Wolfgang by his family early in his life. Graham was the youngest son of a lower-middle-class Jewish family that had emigrated from Russia prior to the rise of Nazism. Graham's father died two days after his son's birth. Graham's mother placed her son and his younger sister in an orphanage in Berlin due to the increasing peril to Jews in Germany. The orphanage sent them to France in a pre–Holocaust exchange of Jewish children for Christian orphans. Graham's older sisters stayed behind with his mother. After the fall of France, Graham was among a group of Jewish orphans spirited out of France. A majority of the children—including Graham's older sister Tolla—did not survive the journey. Graham's mother was killed in Auschwitz. Graham had five sisters, Rita, Evelyn, Sonja, Ester and Tolla (Tanya). His sister Ester survived Auschwitz. She later moved to the United States and was very close to Graham in his later life. His sister Rita escaped, first to Shanghai and then (after the war) to the United States.

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Graham was drafted into the United States Army in 1951, and served in the Korean War, where he was awarded both the Bronze Star and Purple Heart.

To read more about Bill Graham, visit his page on Wikipedia.

Rena Kornreich Gelissen

Country of origin: Germany

In 1920, Rena was born in Tylicz, Lesser Poland Voivodeship, Poland, to Chaim and Sara Kornreich. She had three sisters: Gertrude, Zosia and Danka. She and her sister were raised in Tylicz, but after the Nazi invasion escaped to Slovakia. To protect the people hiding her, she turned herself in to Auschwitz. She was on the first transport of Jewish women into the concentration camp, on March 26, 1942. There, she was tattooed "1716", being the "716'th" female to enter the camp. Three days later, her sister Danka joined her, where they forged an incredibly strong bond of love and compassion that would help them survive the three years and forty-one days that they would endure in the camp, undergoing hunger, torment and abuse. Among these years, Rena and her sister narrowly escaped Nazi experimentation, underwent forced labour and in January 1945, the death march to the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

To find out more about Rena Kornreich Gelissen, visit her page on Wikipedia, or read her memoir, Rena's Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz.

Marcus Goldman

Country of origin: Germany

Marcus Goldman (December 9, 1821 – July 20, 1904) was a German-born American businessman and entrepreneur. He was born in Trappstadt, Germany and emigrated to the United States in 1848. He was the founder of Goldman Sachs, which was one of the world's largest global investment banks and is now a bank holding company.

To find out more about Marcus Goldman visit his page on Wikipedia.

Lisa Kalvelage

Country of origin: Germany

Kalvelage's passion for peace began after she and her immediate family lived through aerial bombings and other horrors during World War II. At the time, she was a young girl living in the historical city of Nuremberg, Germany.

Read more of Lisa Kalvelage's story here, or listen to an interview with her here.

Albert Bierstadt

Country of origin: Germany

Albert Bierstadt (January 7, 1830 – February 18, 1902) was a German-American painter best known for his lush, sweeping landscapes of the American West. In obtaining the subject matter for these works, Bierstadt joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion. Though not the first artist to record these sites, Bierstadt was the foremost painter of these scenes for the remainder of the 19th century.

To find out more about Albert Bierstadt, visit his page on Wikipedia, or see a catalog of his amazing paintings here.

Harry Gluckman

Country of origin: Germany

The Gluckman family was one of hundreds of Jews who escaped Germany and occupied Europe in 1939-40 by traveling eastward. Many landed in San Francisco and were processed at Angel Island. Some of their stories are only now coming to light.

To read more about Harry Gluckman, visit his page on aiisf.org

Eva Schott Berek

Country of origin: Germany

Berek was born in Berlin in 1921, where she lived with her parents, Ernst and Hedwig (Hedi) Schott. Ernst had owned a small shoe factory and later earned a decent living as a buyer for a shoe company. He had been a World War I vet and was wounded fighting for Germany.

But starting in 1938 neither Ernst nor Hedi were allowed to work under the Nazis’ increasingly repressive regulations. Eva was kicked out of high school at age 14 because the Nazis did not allow Jewish children to attend public school. By 1940, the Nazis had already deported many Jews to concentration camps. Berek thinks that her family might have been spared because they lived in a Catholic neighborhood and because her father was a war veteran.

Her parents were forced to sell their possessions to survive. After the 1939 German attack on Poland that began World War II, Germany faced many food shortages. Jews were confined by a curfew to stay in their houses until 4 p.m., after which it was almost impossible to find food in the shops.

To read more of Eva Schott Berek's story, visit aiisf.org.

Salvatore Grosso

Country of origin: Germany

Salvatore "Sonny" Grosso is a movie and television producer and former New York City Police Department detective, noted for his role in the case immortalized in the book and movie versions of the French Connection. He was born in the early 1930s in Düsseldorf, Germany.

To learn more about Salvatore Grosso, visit his page on Wikipedia, or see his page on neco.org.

Henry E. Steinway

Country of origin: Germany

Henry E. Steinway (February 15, 1797 – February 7, 1871) made pianos in Germany and the United States. He was the founder of the piano company Steinway & Sons.

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Because of the unstable political climate following the revolutions of 1848 in the German states, Steinweg decided to leave the country. He emigrated from Braunschweig to New York City in 1851 with four of his sons, but before leaving he gave the company to his son, Christian Friedrich Theodor Steinweg. Later in New York, he anglicized his name to Henry E. Steinway upon advise from friends, who concluded, that the German surname Steinweg would be disadvantageous for doing business. Steinway and his sons worked for other piano companies until they could establish their own production under the name of Steinway & Sons in 1853.

The overstrung scale in a square piano earned the Steinway Piano first prize at the New York Industrial Fair of 1855. In 1862 they gained the first prize in London in competition with the most eminent makers in Europe; and this victory was followed in 1867 by a similar success at the Universal exposition in Paris. According to Franz Liszt, Anton Rubinstein, and other high authorities, the Steinways have done more to advance the durability, action, and tone-quality of their instruments than any other makers of Europe or America.

To read the fascinating story of Henry E. Steinway, see his page on Wikipedia, as well as the page about the company he founded.

Emmy Noether

Country of origin: Germany

Amalie Emmy Noether, German pronunciation: [ˈnøːtɐ], (23 March 1882 – 14 April 1935) was an influential German mathematician known for her groundbreaking contributions to abstract algebra and theoretical physics. Described by David Hilbert, Albert Einstein and others as the most important woman in the history of mathematics, she revolutionized the theories of rings, fields, and algebras. In physics, Noether's theorem explains the fundamental connection between symmetry and conservation laws.

To read more about Emmy Noether, visit her page on Wikipedia.